Dalet


Dalet is the fourth letter of the Semitic abjads, including Phoenician Dālet, Hebrew 'Dālet ד, Aramaic Dālath, Syriac Dālaṯ ܕ, and Arabic Dāl د. Its sound value is a voiced alveolar plosive.
The letter is based on a glyph of the Middle Bronze Age alphabets, probably called dalt "door", ultimately based on a hieroglyph depicting a door: O31
The Phoenician letter gave rise to the Greek delta, Latin D, and the Cyrillic letter Д.

Hebrew dalet

Hebrew spelling: דָּלֶת
The letter is dalet in the modern Israeli Hebrew pronunciation. Dales is still used by many Ashkenazi Jews and daleth by some Jews of Middle-Eastern background, especially in the diaspora. In some academic circles, it is called daleth, following the Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation. It is also called daled. The ד like the English D represents a voiced alveolar stop. Just as in English, there may be subtle varieties of the sound that are created when it is spoken.

Variations

Dalet can receive a dagesh, being one of the six letters that can receive Dagesh Kal.
There are minor variations to this letter's pronunciation, such as
In addition, in modern Hebrew, the combination ד׳ is used when transcribing foreign names to denote.

Significance

In gematria, dalet symbolizes the number four.
The letter dalet, along with the He is used to represent the Names of God in Judaism. The letter He is used commonly, and the dalet is rarer. A good example is the keter of a tallit, which has the blessing for donning the tallit, and has the name of God usually represented by a dalet. A reason for this is that He is used as an abbreviation for HaShem "The Name" and the dalet is used as a non-sacred way of referring to God.
Dalet as a prefix in Aramaic is a preposition meaning "that", or "which", or also "from" or "of"; since many Talmudic terms have found their way into Hebrew, one can hear dalet as a prefix in many phrases
In modern Hebrew the frequency of the usage of dalet, out of all the letters, is 2.59%.

Syriac daled/dolath

In the Syriac alphabet, the fourth letter is ܕ — dolath in western pronunciation, dalath and daled in eastern pronunciation. It is one of six letters that represents two associated sounds. When daled/dolath has a hard pronunciation it is a. When it has a soft pronunciation it is traditionally pronounced as a. The letter is very common in Syriac as it is often attached to the beginning of words as the relative pronoun.
Daled/dolath is always written with a point below it to distinguish it from the letter resh, which is identical apart from having a point above. As a numeral, dalad/dolath stands for the number four. With various systems of dots and dashes, it can also stand for 4,000 and 40,000.

Arabic dāl

ءد
ءد.ءدءد
ءد
The letter is named dāl, and is written in several ways depending on its position in the word:
The letter represents a sound.

Character encodings